


The Unbecoming of You

by Schgain



Category: All Quiet on the Western Front
Genre: Can Be considered poetry, Frostbite, I suppose 'You' isn't really necessarily Paul-- any soldier would do, Is there even an All Quiet on the Western Front Fandom?, Mental Illness, POV Second Person, This is in fact a story about You, War, World War I, You is totally gay for classic poets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-06
Updated: 2015-01-06
Packaged: 2018-03-06 07:51:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3126782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Schgain/pseuds/Schgain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>War changes us all. But how do you cope when you can very easily fall asleep in the snow and never wake up?</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Unbecoming of You

**Author's Note:**

> The real kudos goes to Allen Ginsberg.

You don't often wake up to bombs and shells. 

In fact, you never do-- You must have fainted in your trench, and you grimace when you kick a rat off you. You're soaked from ice and snow-- Someone's screaming. There are spots dancing in front of your eyes, and though you know it won't help, the best you can do is brush them away with a dismissive hand. 

Your wool glove is soaked, your fingertips blue. You press them into your mouth for warmth, but they run across yellowed ivories instead. What thoughts you have of the things you miss-- you think of poetry, and the graveyard-- your teeth only help to remind you of the marble tombs. In your fatigue you bite down on your poor abused digits, hoping to interrogate some feeling back into your hands. 

In the cold you consider yourself in need of a picnic. The food you have in your pockets is as solid as the rock you sit on. You imagine the grocer's back home-- a jewish place, and whole families would peruse at a time. You remember seeing French girls in the cookies, babies crawling through grains. Wives and mothers with heads in heads of cabbages. 

Your vision is still dancing, and you can't shoot straight. You opt to lay back down in the mud. Filthy old grubber, you are. You grind your teeth, bone against bone. A flash of narrative whistles through your head, and you cling to the syllables like lifelines, tangling them in your burnt and frozen and electric fingers. Greek letters you had never bothered to learn, english words that don't make sense. Backwards russian letters and the ugly greenish-reddish-blue that signifies a gunshot that rings in your ears. Someone is screaming. There's red on your hands, but you can't tell if it's blood, or rust, or mud. You decide it doesn't matter, and bite down on your fingernails. 

You tell the person screaming to shut up, and the person who just started crying to grow up. Oh haha. They're both you. Was this poetic? Was this, Walt Whitman, with your beard scraping your American Collar, pointing in the breeze like a self-made arrow of experience. 

You hold in your hands a gun, Walt Whitman, when you should be holding Oscar Wilde, trading with him words and adjectives and lamentable free verse. You saw them both in the hall earlier, haggard and worn, missing words floating out of their even more worn down tongues. The words fall into your meager sack of groceries, and vaguely you recall having those rations on you. 

One nearly dead hand reaches into your pocket, fighting the gangrene and frostbite for the idea of words. A folded up paper, creamy and tattered. You unfold it with shaking hands, or maybe you cut to the chase and tear it in half. You'd call it palsy, but you're no doctor. You're just a soldier, with Lord Byron on your copper buttons and your ammunitions stocked with the sharp crescendos of Laurence Binyon. You were saying something to these false prophets, these anglican shepherds, but the only thing you can hear now is the sound of your red, red, hands.

Stop screaming, Walt Whitman. It's unbecoming of a poet.


End file.
